Текст книги "King of flesh and bone"
Автор книги: Liv Zander
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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 14 страниц)
Chapter 17
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Enosh
Throughout my existence, I had stood in valleys now covered in water and climbed mountains now crumbled. I had conversations with kings surrounded by riches and beggars rotting in rags. I had seen the sky on fire and the seas turn to endless ice.
Decades. Centuries. Eons.
Never before had I had a wife.
A mortal so selfless and true, she’d negotiated with a god to gain rot for those children she’d never birthed. Little over a month with Ada, and she conflicted everything that had been true to me for two hundred years.
It did nothing to cure my obsession.
I lounged on my throne, one leg perched over its armrest, watching my wife with utter fascination. How she gingerly trailed the hairs of the brush over a young blossom, the lack of a chain allowing her to turn the throne room into a garden of thorns and roses. More curious was how she grabbed the next brush from Orlaigh’s rot-speckled hands with not a trace of disgust stalling the movement.
The strangest flutter came to my chest, touching me in a place where I ought to be numb. Ah, my little one called me heartless, the world I had created cruel; yet it had produced a woman so at ease around the remnants of death, she had begged me for rot instead of fainting at the sight of it.
A most perfect mate.
My woman, my wife.
My queen?
“You may leave us, Orlaigh.” I rose and descended the dais, only to sit beside Ada and glimpse into the depleting oils. “My little one is running out of paints.”
Her eyes remained fixed on the sway of yet another vine, but it didn’t escape me how her blue eyes flicked to me for a fraction of a moment. “Don’t bother sending the old woman for more. I’ll run out of canvas even sooner.”
Ah, my mouthy wife and her snarky remarks, pointing out the lack of bone at any opportunity that presented itself. Whatever her simple upbringing, when it came to convincing me to open my gates, she lacked no ambition.
I hooked a finger underneath her chin, bringing her mouth close enough to mine that I sensed the heat of our lips merge. “There are always the bridges.”
“And leave our child with nothing to paint on once he’s old enough? Whatever will he do all day?”
“Perhaps I will take pity on a corpse outside and turn it into a doll.”
“Bone cradle, skin tunics… heavens, an arm to play stick and hoop, and someone’s skull for a rattle. That has to take at least three.” Her eyes ensnared mine with stomach-fluttering intensity. “Taking pity on one simply won’t be enough.”
An unexpected laugh escaped me, no matter the somber truth of her words. “Ah, I am gaining the sense that my wife will not stop pestering me.”
“A husband’s lot until he dies.” She shrugged, chewing down a self-satisfied grin. “Or in your case, for eternity.”
Mmm, such was the ignorance of her mortal mind. She didn’t understand that I favored an eternity plagued by her ambition over a single stroke of time without her by my side.
I raked my fingers along the back of her neck and into the warm weight of her tresses to cup her head. “Ought we to negotiate anew? Your silence on the matter in exchange for three corpses?”
“You haven’t been around a lot of women if you think a woman’s silence comes so cheap.”
“I have not.” I brushed my lips along the corner of her mouth. “You are only the second living woman I have touched, yet you are second to none.”
Her heart gave a single, out-of-rhythm beat as she blinked up at me. “Sometimes you say the nicest things when you’re not busy threatening to throw me onto a pile of corpses.”
“My pleasure.”
There was a faint scoff. “I’m not sure I have anything left to offer.”
“Start with a kiss.”
Her lips tingled so nicely as she wet them in anticipation. Her mouth brushed over mine, letting my pulse quicken alongside hers. I shared in this sense of weakness claiming our muscles as our faces drifted together. Breaths mingled. Lips connected. Parted. I kissed her, deep and drinking, enjoying how she offered no reluctance, no fight, no pretense. And yet…
And yet…
A single muscle tensed at the back of her neck as it often did whenever we touched, refusing to ease on its own, no matter how I stroked, caressed, thumbed—no, it remained stiff and stubborn, a manifestation of her unyielding mind, turning our kiss stale against my tongue.
My thoughts wandered back to how she’d pushed me away at the tavern; her beautiful eyes filthed with the promise that she will never have affection for me. Something utterly inconsequential to a god, and it shouldn’t bother me so.
So why did it?
We’d come to an arrangement, hadn’t we? My little one had given me her vow to remain by my side, to always return to it. With loneliness banished, what else was there to want?
Nothing.
No, nothing.
Except, perhaps… her mouth straining on the thickness of my flesh, while my cock fucked the back of her throat until that cursed muscle gave.
“Open your mouth, little one.” Fist curling in her hair, I pushed her head down while taking myself out with the other hand. “Take me between your lips and suck. Mmm, yes… like that.”
Oh, what a dutiful little wife she proved to be, running her lips down my quickly hardening length, even as she shuffled for balance and arranged her limbs. Such a beautiful creature, the gulps and wet suckles coming from her lips nothing short of mesmerizing.
“Yes, ah, you do this so well, my precious wife,” I moaned, caressing her hair and the shell of her ear in the way that never failed to soften her. “Take me deeper. Mmm, so perfect.”
She swallowed my cock in greedy gulps, letting her lips run over the thick veins feeding my shaft, only for a new rush of blood to swell them further. My crown imprinted itself at the very end of her, a mere finger-width from a muscle that… would… not… give.
The way I gripped her hair tighter barely eased the heated itch around my knuckles as I pushed her head down, feeding her thrust after thrust of my hips. Little coughs tingled around my crown—more intense when her throat clenched—letting my testicles rise with my approaching release.
Gripping myself at the base, I pulled her mouth off me, watching how rope after rope of seed splattered onto her face. It caught on her lashes, painted her pink lips, and dripped down from the tip of her nose as I held her still.
Ada glanced up at me from glistening eyes. The harder her cunt throbbed, the more her diaphragm tightened. Nothing but a spreading extension of that knot in her neck, refusing her complete surrender to us. And what was it to me, a god? Was my wife not mine, married and oh-so perfectly marked with my seed?
“You did well.” A knuckle cracked as I eased my hand from her hair and pulled her up for a kiss, tasting myself on her lips. “Go to your room and clean yourself up. Choose a book while I wash in the spring, and I shall bring you release upon my return, then I shall read to you. Go!”
As she stumbled to her feet and then down the dais, I willed the muscle in her neck to surrender. I made what she failed to do on her own, what I could not inspire, the act leaving me dull and tired.
I shucked off my shirt, letting it drop to the dais as the leather around my legs turned to the finest powder waiting on my command, then headed toward the spring.
The moment I entered the cave, warm moisture settled on my cheeks, the air woven with traces of salt and minerals from the mountain in which the Pale Court sat. A welcome change to the staleness of ash clinging to my skin, which faded as I sunk into the hot water. It would return soon—it always did; a constant reminder of the pain I’d endured.
Sudden coldness gripped the surrounding stone as a familiar voice whispered, “Enosh…”
I might have been immortal, but even I shuddered when Eilam loomed over my shoulder. “Yarin had an excuse but, if I remember correctly, I owe you nothing.”
“Aside from an apology.” Eilam stripped from a threadbare tunic that must have been centuries old, slipped into the water, and tilted his head back to soak his eerily white hair. “You stole the mortal woman from underneath me, turning her final breath into one of many more to come.”
My muscles tightened. “What is it to you?”
“There ought to be—”
“Balance!” Yarin emerged from the corridor with the gutted corpse of a man shuffling beside him, wedging a sigh from me. “How blessed I am to arrive at such time where I can listen to Eilam’s awe-inspiring lecture on balance. On my word, it gets more exciting with each century he repeats… Oh, are we bathing? I love to bathe!”
My temples already ached at his grinding chatter, but they pounded when he slipped out of his boots. “I do not recall inviting either of you.”
Eilam stared at how pearls of water ran down his arm, my brother so wholly unaccustomed to his form, something so simple as water running down his skin eluded him. “Continue to tip the balance, Enosh, and I shall not be so lenient a second time.”
My molars ground together. “Are you threatening my wife?”
“Enosh!” Yarin gave an exasperated gasp. “I believe he just threatened your wife.”
“Death threatens your wife.” Eilam gave a lazy shrug. “She is only mortal, after all. Nothing but flesh and thought and breath. Insignificant.”
I gripped his hair and pushed his head underwater, letting the splash of droplets mingle with Yarin’s chortle. Bracing against the way Eilam struggled and fought, I hooked a leg around his, ripping him off balance, only to watch my brother drown. As equal as we were in strength, Eilam had the dexterous development of a child.
Only when he expelled his final breath and drifted seemingly lifeless on the surface did I let go. “Why are you here? Again?”
Yarin huffed. “Is that a way to welcome your favorite brother?”
“A thoroughly high-handed statement.”
“Considering that Eilam is currently drifting on the water, thinking he’s dead where he cannot die, I presume, gives me some leeway for said statement.” He slipped into the water uninvited, but at least he gestured for the corpse to stay back. “In any case, look what happened to my new toy.”
I didn’t so much see the man’s guts dangling from a gaping wound in his belly, but sense how it bounced and twisted with every shift in his balance. “You broke it.”
“I broke it,” he said, his tone void of any culpability over it. “Luckily, I happen to have a brother who can fix—”
“No.”
“—and I happen to know that I am his favorite, so he would never deny me this small favor.”
“No.”
“Your wife is quite right… What a bastard you are,” he said and leaned his head back against the edge, expelling a breath toward the gray stalactites looming above. “Let me tell you, Enosh, I am no man of casual infatuations, but I have grown quite fond of this one ever since Airensty.”
The corpse bowed, letting his bowels smack against his naked kneecaps. “Thank you, Master.”
“Yes, yes, yes, now hush your mouth and let the gods talk.” Yarin swatted the air until the man stepped back. “Please make him pretty again.”
I glanced over my shoulder at the corpse, naked aside from the thin gold chains decorating his cock. “Whatever do you want with this man?”
Yarin chuckled. “Brother, a god ought to have a preference, and mine is… none. I have no preference. You should try it some—”
Eilam kicked his legs and flailed his arms, heaving in a breath as he wiped his hair from his face, his pitch-black eyes boring into me. “You dare do this to my form?”
“Rude.” Yarin tsked. “Everyone keeps interrupting.”
“Mortals call this drowning,” I said. “One of the better ways to die from my experience, since I am the one bound to my form and all the pain it can endure. Come near my wife, and I shall call upon every bone in the ground until the earth shakes and the land cracks once more, raising an army that will raze kingdoms, continents, the entire world… killing everything that breathes.”
Eilam coughed up a final swell of water, his arms shaky from centuries of avoiding his form. “My brothers’ fondness for mortal bodies confounds me greatly.”
“Ah, yes, spoken like a true virgin who doesn’t know where to put his cock, mostly because he has yet to figure out just where it hangs.” Yarin tapped my shoulder, guiding my attention back to the corpse. “Here is a fantastic proposal from your favorite brother… na, na, na! Hear me out! Fix him, and I shall make your wife love you.”
My molars ground together until my jaws ached. “Why would I want that?”
“Because you’re half enamored with her already,” he whispered, letting my spine adopt the stiffness of the rock behind me. “So unpredictable. Love. If you do not stir it one way, it may just stumble another. Ah, how Njala’s soul called out his name when it came to me… Joah. Joah! Oh, where is my beloved Joah?”
The name pounded inside my skull like a never-ending echo, heating the blood in my veins until sweat dampened my forehead. “Do you have a wish to drown as well?”
“Who would have thought that the very man who stole her away from you would gain her heart and affection during those months you searched for her? Chased her into her death, really. So unwilling was she to return to you, the father of the child growing in her belly, she instead chose to die at Joah’s blade. Tragic. Oh, so… tragic.”
I pushed down the rage, the bone-deep fury that caused the stalactites above to vibrate. Yes, a tragedy, how my companion had sworn me her love from the sweetest of lips… wicked, wayward mortal turning a god into a fool.
But it would not happen a second time.
I shook my head. “I have no need for more illusions.”
“You are so difficult to negotiate with,” Yarin said. “Very well, no illusions. New offer. Fix him, and I will not make your wife love you. Instead, I shall give you… let’s say… fifteen words.”
“Fifteen words?”
“To relay to your wife, forged to penetrate her in a place that might take you centuries to reach, if ever. Do not send a spike of bone through me for saying this, beloved brother, but your understanding of a woman’s heart equals Eilam’s ability to find his genitals.”
His offer roused a flutter around my organs. Hmm, fifteen words to reach into her soul, stoking affection for me. She would adore me; she would love me.
That damn muscle would give.
Against the hairs rising along my arm, I fixed the corpse with a mere thought. “Fifteen words.”
“Plus, one of advice, because you are truly my favorite of brothers,” Yarin said. “Deliver those words during an act of kindness, giving her something she desires. It will touch her so deeply. And if it fails…? Well, you can always slit her throat and replace her with another mortal, like you have done before.”
I turned my head and stared at him. “The mortal Joah Mertok slit Njala’s throat.”
“Oh, yes, I know,” he said with a chuckle. “I just never figured out if he was alive when he did it, or if he was already dead.”
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Chapter 18
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Ada
The polished fangs adorning the bodice of my dress clanked with each step as I headed across the bridge toward an empty throne. Enosh had left through the Æfen Gate earlier, undoubtedly assessing if soldiers lined the Blighted Fields in an attempt to cap—
“…keep yer rotten mouth quiet.” Orlaigh’s hushed mumble invaded my thoughts, putting a hitch into my next step.
She glared up at the throne from the bottom of the dais, one hand clasping Enosh’s shirts in need of washing, the other shaking a scolding finger at… at one of the corpses?
A shudder lifted the hairs at the nape of my neck. Had they groaned again? They did that sometimes, their muffled nocturne almost forming words; wasn’t it for how the sounds broke against the skin pasted over their mouths, distorting it all into blood-clotting grunts.
“All it’ll do is get me bones braided into the throne right next to ye,” she said and pressed a palm against her forehead, releasing an exasperated sigh. “Ach, if me Master ever finds out the truth… Foolish, foolish girl.”
My heart beat faster, no matter how I tried to breathe it into quiet compliance as I inched closer. Orlaigh had called Njala a foolish girl, but what truth was she talking about? And to which of the corpses in the throne?
Another step.
Another clank of my fangs.
Orlaigh spun toward me, lifting a smile too tense around the corners. “Ach, lass, I was about to get ye.”
Arms wrapped around myself, I crossed the rest of the bridge and walked up to her. “Who did you talk to?”
Her belly shook with a chortle. “Talk? Dinnae have no soul to talk to in this place but ye.”
Me, and two soul-bound corpses. “I heard you from the bridge.”
She swatted the air dismissively. “Aye, time makes yer own head yer best companion. Dinnae mind me chattering to meself like a goose.”
“But I—”
“Me Master has a surprise for ye, lass.” She stroked her palm down my arm. “But ye cannae go like this, letting the autumn winds howl across yer neck.”
Whatever suspicion my body held fell away, quickly replaced with a buzz of energy tingling my toes. “Enosh is taking me outside?”
“Aye, lass. Did ye eat the pudding I brought earlier?”
My pulse quickened at her question, then some more when I said, “I woke feeling a bit ill and had no appetite.”
The way her eyes dropped to my belly roused an expectant flutter around my heart I couldn’t afford. Probably nothing but an upset stomach. That, or the sad mind of a woman who’d always welcomed her monthly bleeding with tears. It was too early for me to have such signs of pregnancy, no matter how subtle.
“Wait here while I fetch ye a fur,” she said, then made her way toward my room.
My eyes wandered back to the corpses in the throne. Enosh had the terrible habit of restoring them some, only to let them rot away until their faces crumbled off in pieces. If they had mouths, what stories would they tell?
Hesitant steps brought me closer. One more, and my shins pressed against the throne until they ached. I leaned in close enough that I caught a whiff of their subdued stench, like soured milk mixed with the fumes of burnt incense.
Lord Tarnem’s eyes made a blood-curdling sound as they shifted to focus on me, like boots sinking into deep mud. Gray and woven with hairline cracks, his right jawbone shifted, and the brown skin across his mouth groaned as it stretched and—
“Hmmp… mhh.”
I shifted back on a gasp as my heart thundered like the boom of hooves in my chest. His mumbles continued with such urgency, a tendon slowly frayed at the motion. Heavens, I couldn’t make out a single word. What was he saying?
Back and forth, my eyes followed the movement of his tongue pressing against the skin from the other side. And if I cut into it, would I find a mouth behind it? Did I want to know what it had to say?
I clasped one of the fangs dangling from my bodice, pointed enough it might pierce the leathery skin. Seconds passed with nothing but the frantic rush of blood in my veins. What would this serve me, other than to feed this skin-itching curiosity?
It would gain me nothing. Trouble, perhaps. And still the fine thread of skin gave a crk as I ripped the fang off. I lifted it toward Lord Tarnem’s mouth.
He mumbled faster, louder.
Sweat broke on my forehead.
I pressed the fang against the skin.
I pushed down, and—
“What are ye doing, lass?”
Letting the fang retreat into my palm, I trailed my finger over the brittle skin, then turned to Orlaigh. “Just looking if he still has a mouth.”
“Aye, one full of lies.” Orlaigh’s heavy stare remained on me for another moment, the valleys beneath her cheekbones filling with patches of shadows. “Time has a way of twisting the truth.”
Apparently, in a way that put her at risk of gracing the throne. For that reason alone, there was no point in pushing her for it.
She came up the dais as I let the fang clank to the ground on a cough, put a light fur around my shoulders, then ushered me toward the Æfen Gate. “I prepared me Master a satchel with enough food and drink ye dinnae have to find a tavern. Aye, ye best have yer wits about ye when ye go home.”
“Home?” My steps echoed along the dark incline, toward where the first streaks of light appeared, which broke against the outline of Enosh beside a horse.
“Yer wife,” Orlaigh said, “as me Master requested.”
Enosh secured a burlap bag to the harness the brown horse carried, then turned and reached his hand out in invitation. “Come to me, little one.”
I let my fingers intertwine with his. “Where are you taking me?”
He guided me beside the horse and let his knuckles stroke along my cheek, his gunmetal eyes fixed on mine. “To Hemdale, so you may point out John’s grave and visit your father. Briefly.”
Weakness gnawed at my knees until they softened beneath me, and a sudden rush of joy blurred my vision with tears. Brief or not, I would see Pa at least one final time. He wouldn’t have to spend the rest of his life wondering about me.
Unable to contain my excitement, I thrust myself at Enosh, arms struggling to wrap around the entirety of his upper body. “Thank you.”
“Mmm, how nicely your heart stumbles over its cadence.” He encapsulated me in his embrace, then let his hands shift to my hips. “Is my mortal pleased?”
“Very,” I said, reaching for a handful of mane as he lifted me onto the horse’s back. “You couldn’t have given me a better wedding gift.”
“Wedding gift?” He arched a brow at me, then mounted. “Oh, mortals and their customs.”
Orlaigh cleared her throat and held out her rot-speckled hands. “Master, me flesh?”
“Upon my return. Hemdale is not such a far span away, and we shall be back by night.”
Enosh let the horse trample over the carpet of corpses. One of them twitched, then another. Soon, several struggled themselves onto their battered legs to limp behind us, spears of bone forming in their palms.
“Did you see danger?” I asked as we rode up a winding path a recent storm must have carved into the hillside, the air moist with traces of moldy leaves.
“Nothing concerning or I wouldn’t have brought you along, but we ought to have protection. They will follow at a distance as not to draw too much attention while we stay away from the roads.”
I glanced back at them and how they shrank as the distance increased, their clothes nothing but tattered shreds here and there. One had a broken jaw, which dangled on a tendon bouncing against his chest.
Behind me, Enosh exhaled audibly. “You have no disgust for the dead, do you?”
A chuckle escaped me. “As a child, I cut more tangled corpses from Pa’s fish cages than I could count. Orlaigh told me Njala didn’t like the Pale Court.”
His chest hardened against my spine. “No, she found no appreciation for the beauty it once carried.”
The benevolence in his tone ached me somewhere, inching me toward a question I’d ignored for days. “Do you love her still?”
“Mmm, my dutiful wife, I am not as fickle-minded as my brother.” He nuzzled my temple before he let his whisper break against the shell of my ear. “No, I do not. Perhaps I no longer possess a heart to gift you, but you own my loyalty.”
Every single one of his words touched me in a million different places, stirring a concerning tingle underneath my ribs. “A simple no would have sufficed.”
A chuckle against the top of my head. “Ah, but a simple no would not have inspired such a flutter in your core.”
Heat crept into my cheeks. Damn him and how he stripped me of the ability to deny how he worked himself under my skin.
“Perhaps my woman’s silence comes at little cost after all,” he mused after a while, the slightly elevated pitch of his voice giving away his amusement. “I shall enjoy it for the few beats it lasts.”
It lasted for what felt like an arse-numbing eternity, but likely was no more than three hours from the height of the late-morning sun. Dead horses traveled quicker since their hooves never mis-stepped and no exhaustion claimed their lungs, or so Enosh had once explained.
I shifted my dull muscles and peered back at the crown of the Pale Court as it disappeared into the horizon. “A traveler once told me he walked around the Pale Court, though we call it the Graying Tower, and he only ever found one entrance. How come, if there are three more?”
“I cannot say,” Enosh confessed, steering our horse around tall birch trees, toward a clearing that twinkled ahead in a play of light and shadow. “When I came into existence, the Pale Court shaped around me as such, as did the Court Between Thoughts for my brother.”
“And the third?”
“The world is Eilam’s court.” Shifting on the horse, he assessed the forest in all directions, then pointed at the lush patch of grass speckled with deep green shamrock and red clover. “We shall rest here so you may eat and… tend to your other mortal needs.”
“What a fine way of saying that you know how badly I have to piss.”
Something I executed promptly behind a nearby shrub. When I returned to the horse on straight legs, Enosh took the satchel from the harness and handed it to me.
“Did the old woman pack a blanket as well?”
Enosh huffed as if I’d insulted him, crossing his arms in front of his chest as streams of bonedust drifted around us on the wind. They came together in four sturdy posts, forming a rectangle, intricately tooled with motives of thorny vines swallowing creatures. Alabaster crossbeams appeared above us, with rings of bone from which the sheerest fabric weaved itself toward the ground on all four sides.
It wafted in the wind with an iridescent shimmer, its ends catching on the backrest of a large daybed. It formed at the center, beautifully shaped of the whitest bone, topped with pelts of gray mink.
I swallowed past a lump of awe. “Now I understand what you mean by the beauty of the Pale Court. You could create palaces… entire kingdoms.”
He took the satchel from me. “These lands are ripe with flesh and bone.”
Ripe.
The word caused a shift in my core, amplified by how Enosh placed a hand around my middle and guided me to the daybed. “May I ask you something?”
“You may.”
“Am I… am I pregnant? You could feel it before my bleeding is due, could you not?”
He lowered himself onto the daybed, one leg outstretched and the other angled at the edge, and planted me in front of him. “I sense no child growing inside you.”
My chest constricted.
I counted one shallow breath, two, three, waiting for a sense of relief, a lightness in my chest—hell, I would have done with a long exhale. Instead, old cracks of pain veined across my heart.
It was disappointment.
Disappointment and guilt, because my neck shortened in preparation for a “You have failed to conceive yet again, Adelaide,” or “What a useless wife you’ve turned out to be, Adelaide.”
But Enosh placed his hand on the diamond of my bone collar and pulled me back to rest against his chest as he whispered, “Patience.”
That only made it worse.
He wasn’t supposed to be this calm and unconcerned about something he clearly wanted so much. Just as I wasn’t supposed to soak up the word and slacken, content with his conviction that I would soon carry a child I shouldn’t want.
“Open,” he said, bringing a little red ball of a fruit I had no name for to my lips.
My lips parted obediently as he fed me like he often did, all while his other hand combed through my hair, turning me soft underneath the skilled fingers of a god. And what if I wanted this child he promised? Did that make me gullible? Selfish? Did I have a reason left to judge myself so harshly when others had done it for years?
I contemplated on that throughout the meal until a cutting breeze wafted from the forest to the left, ruffling the feathers of my dress and pebbling my skin.
Enosh tugged on my shoulder fur, letting it thicken into the softest pelt, taking great care as he gathered my hair and lifted it over the fur with scalp-tingling tenderness. “Better?”
“Yes.” Heat swarmed my belly at the concern in his voice, so I forced my attention to the blossoms carved into the backrest of the daybed. “The way your brother made it sound, the Pale Court was once a lively place with music and… and dancing. I can’t picture it with you.”
“My little wife, your husband is a formidable dancer, unmatched by any mortal man. When gods dance, time itself stands still, so it may watch us in our grace.”
I couldn’t help but grin up at him. “Oh, gods and the stories they tell.”
A spark came to his eyes, followed by his telltale smirk of mischief. “I shall prove it.”
“Wha—”
He promptly rose and pulled me against him. With his arm around the small of my back and his fingers intertwined with mine, my feet scrambled for footing underneath me as he swayed us into the first circle. At the second, the sheer fabric glided over us as he led me into the clearing. Shamrock and clover spun around us, dotting the edges of my vision as my feet found the rhythm.
Tufts of grass wafted around our steps, gently whispering a melody while the air filled with the earthiness of the moist loam beneath our dance. One filled with all the graces one might expect from a god, yet a sparrow danced about on a nearby branch, cocking its head this way and that as it watched us.
“Time is unimpressed,” I said. “Seems to me you dance like any mortal man.”
“Ah, my wife, but can a mortal man do this?”
At the next sway, white feathers drifted away on its current, some catching on the fabric while others flowed into the forest. In their stead, little buds emerged on my dress. When my feet left the ground—Enosh’s hands firm on my waist as he lifted me—the buds bloomed into a thousand pale brown roses, only to wilt and waft into the branches. There, they reshaped into… into what?
I stared up at what appeared to be the flutter of wings, so mesmerized by the beauty of it all as joy illuminated me from within. Enosh let them form into butterflies, with spindly bones for their thorax and the sheerest skin for wings. They slanted into their capricious movement, rising and falling in an unpredictable pattern until, in one surge, they landed on the remaining roses on my dress.
“Do you see its beauty?” Enosh lowered my toes back to the forest floor and stared down at me from the gray storm of his eyes. “The perfection of flesh and bone when in the hands of its master?”
I looked up at him, barely a sliver of air left between our lips. “I see it.”
